Over a million cockroaches escape from cockroach farm

Most of us pay to get rid of cockroaches. But one guy in China paid $16,000 dollars for (shudder) 225 pounds of cockroach eggs, AFP reports. Those 225 pounds of cockroach eggs hatched into an estimated 1.5 million cockroaches. The man, Wang Pengsheng, raised those cockroaches, feeding them goodies like fruit and biscuits every single day. And then all 1.5 million of the cockroaches escaped. If you need us, we will be over here on top of our desks.

AFP:

The cockroaches fled the facility in Dafeng, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, for surrounding cornfields earlier this month after an “unknown perpetrator” destroyed the plastic greenhouse where they were raised, the Modern Express newspaper said.

Why would anyone want more than a million cockroaches? Wang was planning on selling them and making a tidy profit. Ground-up cockroaches are used in traditional Chinese medicine to cure all sorts of ailments. (Is that a more or less disgusting way to be healthy than the feces-based wine? Hard call.)

Apparently roach breeding is a lucrative field that more people are getting into. Quartz reports:

Take for example Zou Hui (pictured below), who’s kind of a poster woman for roach-breeding. Zou was working as a laborer in Ningbo, on China’s eastern coast, when she had her Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. After happening to catch a TV program on the discovery in Yunnan, she found herself “moved by the urge to breed roaches,” quit her job and moved back home to Sichuan province to realize her dream.

And now she’s doing quite well for herself. And though we’re not “moved by the urge to breed roaches” ourselves, we can see how it could be fun to make lots of money grinding them to a pulp. Take that, roaches.